MatriKS: An R package for the automatic generation of rule-based matrices

Few resources are available for the automatic generation of Raven-like matrices. Some of them (e.g., Sandia) are no longer working, while others (e.g., Corvus) are hardly customizable without programming skills in java script. Although the IMak package automatically generates stimuli for psychological assessment, it is limited to one shape and the main rule it applies is the rotation of the elements. MatriKS is a new R package that has been developed for overcoming the abovementioned issues. MatriKS can generate matrices considering different types of rules, starting from the most basic ones (e.g., changes in size, objects orientation) to the most complex ones, based on inferential and inductive reasoning. This unveils the possibility of generating new customizable stimuli, which can be potentially be equivalent between each other.

1 Introduction

Interactive data graphics provides plots that allow users to interact them. One of the most basic types of interaction is through tooltips, where users are provided additional information about elements in the plot by moving the cursor over the plot.

This paper will first review some R packages on interactive graphics and their tooltip implementations. A new package ToOoOlTiPs that provides customized tooltips for plot, is introduced. Some example plots will then be given to showcase how these tooltips help users to better read the graphics.

2 Background

Some packages on interactive graphics include plotly (Sievert 2020) that interfaces with Javascript for web-based interactive graphics, crosstalk (Cheng and Sievert 2021) that specializes cross-linking elements across individual graphics. The recent R Journal paper tsibbletalk (Wang and Cook 2021) provides a good example of including interactive graphics into an article for the journal. It has both a set of linked plots, and also an animated gif example, illustrating linking between time series plots and feature summaries.

3 Customizing tooltip design with ToOoOlTiPs

ToOoOlTiPs is a packages for customizing tooltips in interactive graphics, it features these possibilities.

4 A gallery of tooltips examples

The palmerpenguins data (Horst et al. 2020) features three penguin species which has a lovely illustration by Alison Horst in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Artwork by @allison_horst

Table 1 prints at the first few rows of the penguins data:

Table 1: A basic table

species	island	bill_length_mm	bill_depth_mm	flipper_length_mm	body_mass_g	sex	year
Adelie	Torgersen	39.1	18.7	181	3750	male	2007
Adelie	Torgersen	39.5	17.4	186	3800	female	2007
Adelie	Torgersen	40.3	18.0	195	3250	female	2007
Adelie	Torgersen	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA	2007
Adelie	Torgersen	36.7	19.3	193	3450	female	2007
Adelie	Torgersen	39.3	20.6	190	3650	male	2007

Figure 2 shows an interactive plot of the penguins data, made using the plotly package.

p <- penguins %>% 
  ggplot(aes(x = bill_depth_mm, y = bill_length_mm, 
             color = species)) + 
  geom_point()
ggplotly(p)

Figure 2: A basic interactive plot made with the plotly package on palmer penguin data. Three species of penguins are plotted with bill depth on the x-axis and bill length on the y-axis. When hovering on a point, a tooltip will show the exact value of the bill depth and length for that point, along with the species name.

5 Summary

We have displayed various tooltips that are available in the package ToOoOlTiPs.

CRAN packages used

ToOoOlTiPs, plotly, crosstalk, tsibbletalk, palmerpenguins, ggplot2

CRAN Task Views implied by cited packages

Phylogenetics, Spatial, TeachingStatistics, TimeSeries, WebTechnologies